


build a better Bird Box

by evenifwecantfindheaven



Category: Bird Box (2018)
Genre: Anxiety, Bird Box, Depression, Gen, Horror, Thriller
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 17:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17729720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evenifwecantfindheaven/pseuds/evenifwecantfindheaven
Summary: "Insane" is a legal definition, not a psychological one. Every person who has been deemed "insane" is, by definition, a criminal. So why add "criminally" to the term? Did these people commit special high-level crimes? In any case, they're out there. They've probably formed a compound somewhere, where they plan to reproduce and give birth in broad daylight. A compound that might welcome me with open arms.Premise slightly reimagined. Malorie has depression and the monsters work a little differently, but everything else is the same. This is my attempt at fixing the parts of Bird Box that unfairly villainize mentally ill people while keeping the things about it that made it a good story. Trigger Warning for graphic depictions of depression and suicidal thoughts, death, attempted murder, and ableism.





	build a better Bird Box

_August 3rd, 3:48 pm_

“Jess does not get sad. And she’s not suicidal. She would never do that.”

I let the next words linger on my tongue.

That _I’m_ the one who gets sad.

That _I’m_ the one who wrote a will in the back of my history notebook when I was sixteen, bequeathing most of my stuff to Jess, a sketchbook of drawings to my favorite teacher, my alternative metal tapes to Mom (because she hated them), and explicitly, nothing to Dad.

That _I’m_ the one who glanced over balcony railings and overpasses for years, nonchalantly thinking of how I could make use of them. Not tonight, Malorie. Think of the debris. Think of the taxpayer dollars, the inconvenience. Think of Jess.

That _I’m_ the one who’s been fighting the monsters in my head for the past six months because my anti-depressants could hurt the baby.

I look up into Tom’s concerned, stoic face, then look away. I can’t tell him these things. That would be ridiculous. I haven’t even known him an hour. I haven’t known any of these people an hour. And they have all lost someone. Douglas lost his wife. That guy who owns this house most likely lost his husband. Tom…who knows. But if he has people, he either is or is about to be punched in the gut by grief, same as the rest of us.

The only thing that’s uniquely unfair about my situation is the fact that my sister was just handed the same fate that she spent a lifetime sparing me.

She’s not the one who was meant to die young. I was.

Not taking into consideration, of course, the small matter of my unborn child. Who for the first time, has a name in my head. But only if it’s a girl. Right now, I hope it’s a girl. I’ve known very few genuinely admirable men.

XXX

_September 13th, 9:28 pm_

I always hated those “feel-good movies” where a woman’s life magically gets better after she gives birth. They never seemed realistic. That wasn’t the mother I had. And that wasn’t the mother I was becoming. And yet now that I’m grasping for reasons to keep going, it is here. It needs me to live, in a way that nothing else ever has.

Downstairs, Tom is asleep in his clothes with a loaded weapon eighteen inches from his hand. He doesn’t need me, but for some reason he does like me enough to want me alive. And god knows that we’ve all witnessed enough carnage for one lifetime.

Olympia is asleep next to me in a nightgown with her arms around a harlequin novel and a photo of her probably-dead husband. She _feels_ like she needs me, which would be absurd under almost any other circumstance but this one.

I don’t want to think about her dying. But if we lost anyone else to someone like Fish Fingers, it would be her. Then Cheryl. Tom would be the last one standing. Douglas could go either way, depending on the nature of the fight. He’s been nothing but a grade-A asshole, but at least he has some survival instincts. And he’s still a person.

I realize that I’ve come to care. I didn’t realize that I still had the capacity to care for new people. I wish I didn’t. I shouldn’t be getting attached to them. I shouldn’t be inflicting myself on them, either. I shouldn’t have come into this house. Lydia and Jess should be here, not me. Now here I am, broken and taking up space and time and resources. I shouldn’t be, I shouldn’t be, I shouldn’t be…

But now, I have to be.

Because it needs me.

I think of the last thing Charlie said to me before he killed himself. About Fish Fingers. “He’s been to prison, and he’s a bit crazy, but he’s always nice to me.”

I haven’t been to prison. But I have lashed out at people. I threw a book at my ex-roommate once. What if it hadn’t been a book? What if she’d been bruised? What if she’d reported me to the RA and the university instead of just throwing it back at my face? Maybe I could have been to prison. And god knows that I’ve always been what society considers “a little crazy.”

And here I’d thought that the worst thing that could happen if I saw the creature was my own death. This is much, much worse.

XXX

_September 17th 10:45 pm_

Criminally insane.

My second therapist taught me that “insane” is a legal definition, not a psychological one. It’s not used by doctors or scientists, it’s used by lawyers and judges to determine whether or not a person was responsible for their actions when committing a crime. Every person who has been deemed “insane” is, by definition, a criminal. So why add “criminally” to the term? Did these people commit special high-level crimes? Did they commit many crimes? Are they all murderers?

In any case, they’re out there. They don’t need blindfolds. And sadly, not every “criminally insane” person has a penis. They’ve probably formed a compound somewhere, where they plan to reproduce and give birth in broad daylight to newborns who suffer months of agony until they can muster the strength to snap their own necks, or else become crazy themselves.

A compound that might welcome me with open arms.

Every time I make dinner, or wash the dishes, or rub Olympia’s feet, I am lying to these people. They don’t know who I am. They don’t know what I have the potential to become.

XXX 

_September 18th, 12:03 am_

“If something happens to me, I want you to take care of my baby. Okay?”

And I thought Douglas’s rant about “asylum freaks” was painful to listen to.

Sweet, naive Olympia. What a pure, hopeful child. She looks at me with nothing but light in her eyes, so convinced that I’ll be touched by this misplaced honor and accept it with open arms.

I should tell her the truth now. But what good would that do? She’d probably say something about how I could never be like those awful, crazy people, and then babble on about how much she loves me and expect my depression to wash away in the glow of her words.

I try telling her that nothing’s going to happen to her, but she pleads and begs. She sees her own weaknesses, even if she doesn’t see mine. I give in to the impulse to comfort her with promises and hugs. Then I ask her to take care of my baby if anything happens to me. She says yes without hesitation. I don’t tell her that I’m the first person who my baby will need protection from. I don’t tell her that I’m still wondering if I’d be too screwed up to be a good mother even in a perfect world.

XXX

_September 24th, 11:12 am_

While I’m sharpening pocketknives for everyone, Gary is across the table from me crushing up graham crackers in a plastic bag to feed to our pet birds. Then he scoops out the crumbs and reaches into the cage, quietly singing to them as they nibble out of his hand.

_“And the songbirds are singing_   
_Like they know the score_   
_And I love you, I love you,_   
_I love you, like never before”_

“So, how did you make it here all by yourself?”

Gary shudders at the mention of his harrowing journey.

“I’m not quite sure. Perhaps a miracle.”

One of the birds places a delicate food on his thumb to lean in and reach the food better.

While he strokes their feathers and lets them eat as long as they want, I ask him to tell me more about the people from Northwood. I ask him about their backgrounds, their diagnoses. He claims to know nothing, but then says he heard of at least one man with bipolar disorder who was arrested for assaulting his boss.

My fifth therapist taught me that the symptoms of any mental illness can exist in isolation as easily as in tandem. There’s not a neat, tidy label for everything.

I’m not bipolar, but I am depressive. And these creatures are depression, so there is every chance that that’s enough.

I ask Gary if there’s any way to tell who is and isn’t made a murderer by the creature. He claims to know nothing again.

And how should he? Why would he stick around to interrogate an adversary about their psychiatric history before running for his life? He doesn’t know them. Just like no one will ever know me.

XXX

_September 24th, 10:12 pm_

_My name is Malorie Hayes. I’m thirty-eight years old. Sixteen years ago I was diagnosed with persistent depressive disorder. I first began having symptoms when I was thirteen. I have experienced two major depressive episodes. I have been on four different anti-depressants. I went off eight months ago when I learned that I was pregnant with my first child. As of today, I have never looked at any of the creatures. I do not know what will happen if I ever do._

“Hey. What are you still doing awake?”

I shut my spiral notebook and scan the room, even though I logically know that Olympia, Cheryl, and Gary are upstairs and Douglas is locked in the garage belting out “99 bottles of beer on the wall” to try to keep everyone else awake.

Tom sits down on the couch next to me. He smiles softly.

“What’s up?”

I open the notebook back up to the first page. As the ticking of the clock echoes in an otherwise silent room and Douglas reaches his seventy-fourth bottle of beer, Tom’s face changes.

He knows why I’m showing him this. He wishes he didn’t.

”Promise me that you will not allow me to do harm to anyone.”

This man is not yet thirty. He has survived life and war and armageddon and learned so much and done so much and seen so much. Yet nothing has adequately prepared him for the possibility of having to kill his own comrade.

“I promise.”

His voice is so hollow it sounds like it belongs to someone else.

I am so sorry that I’m putting this on him. But I know he can do it. He has the strength to look me in the eye and make that snap judgment about whether or not to pull the trigger, even knowing that I’ll know he’s doing it. That I’ll be watching myself be murdered by him.

I want to laugh and cry, because for the first time in my short, stupid, life, I have the audacity to fear death.

Tom places one hand on mine and wraps his other arm around my shoulders. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t move. He just lets me stay on the couch with him until I’m ready to go to sleep.

I am so, so, sorry.

XXX

_September 25th 10:17 am_

The next morning, as I’m gearing up to help Cheryl deliver Olympia’s baby, the event that I spent six months thinking would bring my world crashing down occurs.  
  
No, no, no. This can’t be happening. I don’t want to give birth to it now. I don’t want to have the baby yet. I can’t. I have to help Olympia. She gets to have her baby now. I wasn’t supposed to give birth for another two weeks. I’m not doing this. Not now. Not happening, not happening, not happening.

That’s what I tell Tom as he coaxes me upstairs to the bedroom.

Within five minutes, any denial I’ve been granted is yanked away. Contractions reduce me to a screaming animal. Unbridled pain crowds out all thoughts of the pros and cons of my imminent death.

I wish Jess was alive so that I could punch her in the face for suggesting that I have a natural home birth like they did in the old days and her stupid crack about how horses do it all the time. Then again, if she were here, she would probably be making more stupid jokes about how she could deliver the baby if she just had a pair of foaling gloves and how everything would be okay because I would be an even better mom than the horses.

I wish Jess was alive.

Olympia and I try to comfort each other between contractions, but mine are occurring so frequently, so fast that I fall short quickly. 

Cheryl dotes on us, piling the bed with pillows and pulling back our hair, promising it will all be over soon.

Tom, for once, is fairly useless. Which I can tell is hard for him. He keeps looking at me like he wants to help, but the cold hard truth is that there’s nothing he can do. Not to ease my labor pains. Not to fix any of the stuff we talked about last night.

Eventually, Tom and Cheryl help Olympia move onto a mattress on the floor to make both of us some extra space. Then Tom quietly comes over and offers his hand.

I give him the honor of letting me squeeze the life out his hand for the next few contractions, and then as suddenly as it began, it’s over.

“He’s beautiful, Malorie,” Tom says.

_He._

“Tom, go get a blanket for the other baby,” Cheryl instructs. “I think it will be here in a few minutes.”

Tom hesitates, then gets up and rushes off to go look for an appropriate piece of cloth while Cheryl wraps the human being I’ve created in a lime towel and places him on my chest.

“And your auntie thought you’d be a girl.”

But I no longer care what he is.

I hold him close to me. I kiss his beautiful, delicate skin and feel a surge of affection stronger than what I thought any human being, let alone me, was capable of. I love him so much. But now I’ve brought him two weeks early into a dying world. He is no longer safe inside me, away from the light.

At least he doesn’t need me anymore.

He starts sucking on my finger to calm himself down. His heartbeat slows. His breathing softens to a gentle pace. Olympia stops screaming as her pains subside for the moment. Over her deep breathing, I hear the stupid classical music Gary has been playing for the birds this whole stupid time, and over that, I hear a thud. I wonder what that is, but then Olympia starts screaming again and I get distracted trying to comfort her. A few pushes later, her sweet daughter is born. The baby cries. Downstairs, Douglas starts yelling and cursing at…who knows what? It’s Douglas. Gary walks in and starts cooing and fussing over Olympia’s new baby. Then he walks over to me.

“So beautiful,” he mutters.

“What’s going on downstairs?” I ask. I’m wondering if Douglas tried to break back into the house, and if Tom had to do something to stop it. Then again, if Douglas had succeeded in breaking into the house, there should have been more than a thud. I didn’t hear glass shatter. I didn’t hear a scuffle. I didn’t hear Tom’s voice at all.

Yet he went downstairs two get us some extra blankets ten minutes ago and never came back. Something must be wrong. He didn’t want to walk away from me. He should have come back.

Gary leans in. His eyes are positively transfixed on my newborn son. Like the baby I just gave birth to is a prize for him.

The man who claimed to have survived by a miracle.

I look into his eyes. There’s something strange about them. Something surreal about the way the grey and blue flecks of his eyes are arranged.

I should have known.

There are no miracles in hell.

I smile at Gary as I secure my baby with my left arm and use my right to push my aching body off the bed.

Olympia and Cheryl both protest, telling me to go lay back down.

Gary only cares _where_ I’m moving, which is in the direction of Olympia’s makeshift bed.

I place my baby in Olympia’s left arm, the one that isn’t holding her baby girl. Then I cover all three of them, completely, with the comforter. Cheryl, meanwhile, has turned to gather pillows for me to lay down on, so I’m forced to grab her by the arm and yank her back down onto the floor with us, smashing her knee into a nightstand in the process. She wails softly, then screams when the shadows appear in front of us on the ground.

Gary has begun to pull up all the shades in the room.

“Keep your eyes covered!” I shout.

“Look at this!” Gary counters.

“Look away!”

“Look here! Look at it!”

“Look away!”

“Show the babies! Look at it! Show the babies!”

“No, don’t! Don’t listen to him! He’s crazy!”

“I’m not crazy!” Gary screams, spitting in my ear as he does so. Then he reaches both of his arms under mine and lifts me up. Fortunately, my head is the least sore out of all my extremities, and I’m able to throw it back against his without opening my eyes. There’s a sickening crack, a scream, the smell of blood running out his nose. A pain that rattles my whole body as I land back on the wooden floor with my eyes shut. I’m not sure which direction I’m facing anymore. Two walls worth of shades are open. One is in front of me, maybe one is to the left?

And then he grabs me again.

This time, he’s got one arm wrapped around my head, his other arm wrapped around my arms. He gathers up my wrists and clenches them.

I can’t move.

“Gary, stop! You don’t have to do this!”

“Yes, I do! You have to see it! It’s beautiful!”

“I don’t want to see it!”

I can feel him drag me three steps forward, then my chest hits cool, smooth glass. My already-hammering heart skips a beat. Oh my god. He’s going to shove me out the window. Wait-no, he’s not. Now he’s bracing my head against the frame. He’s still got it, but he’s sliding his arm around to the other side. His fingers are crawling up my face. His thumb and ring finger are on my eyelids, pushing, digging. I didn’t even know it was possible to clench my eyelids, but I do, with every ounce of strength they have. It’s no use. I see corners, then slivers. Then he moves his whole hand to my right eye and a slit becomes a landscape, he pulls my head back…

And suddenly, there it is.

I see it.

Some three-hundred feet in front of the house, a looming mass of writhing black roots blowing in their own wind like leaves.

I feel it.

Silent screams of anger, sadness, fear, loneliness, and hate. And of nothing. Eons of nothing. That same nothing that crawled onto my chest and sat there, anchoring me to my bed mattress for increasingly longer periods of an increasingly meaningless existence. The twisted whispers that I’m awful and worthless and proof that there’s no god and the world would be better off without me and too bad I’m too much of a coward to just jump in front of a goddamn bus. The monster that refused to show itself while my mother yelled at me to get my shit together and my teachers threatened me with expulsion and Jess sat with me even when I was too exhausted to speak and inch by inch, day by day, pulled me out of the sinkhole that everyone else had left me to die in.

The darkest, ugliest corners of my past and present are wrenched into focus. I feel them pulsing through my veins, filling my throat with cries of rage.

In all of this, I also feel Gary’s hot breath on my neck.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he breathes.

No.

It’s hideous.

But I’ve already been fighting this creature for years.

And I am not its prey, nor am I its ally.

I am its enemy.

His eyes light up as he lets me go. I step back from the glass.

“You’re not from Northwood, are you?”

“Of course not! I’m not crazy. None of us are! You can see that now!”

Olympia sobs under the blanket. The babies are both crying. Cheryl is crumpled into a ball, trying to shield them with her body.

I step between Gary and all of them.

“No. Not crazy. Just bad.”

He’s confused. He’s never seen someone like me before.

He doesn’t have time to figure it out before I throw my mammoth weight into his thigh, knocking him from his feet, into the glass, through the window, down, down, down.

“Hey, asshole!”

There’s Douglas with the shotgun, eyes still shut tight.

“I pushed him out the window!” I scream quickly. “He’s gone!”

Douglas may still hate me, but he trusts me. And even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have the luxury of that choice in this particular moment.

“Bring the shotgun over here!”

Douglas follows my voice over to the window. Then he aims the gun down and fires it. He misses.

While that’s happening, Tom bursts into the room, one hand shielding his eyes, the other holding a machete.

I fire three shots directly into Gary’s skull. I watch the earth beneath Gary’s head turn red.

I look up. The creature hasn’t budged from its spot. It’s no closer or further from us than it ever was.

I pull the shade back down over the window, and then I pull down all the other shades in the room.

I use the scissor that cut my umbilical cord to fashion three blindfolds out of a pillowcase. I instruct Douglas to go get a hammer so we can nail a tapestry over the broken window and Cheryl to tend to Tom’s wounds and make sure Olympia and the children stay covered.

And I stay by the window, shotgun in hand, and hold the shade down over the opening. I’m not going to let these creatures hurt my family.


End file.
